Björn Söder

Björn Söder (born 3 January 1976 in Väsby parish, Skåne County) is a Swedish politician for the Sweden Democrats and a member of the Riksdag since 4 October 2010. He was the party's secretary from 2005 to 2015, leader of its parliamentary group from 4 October 2010 to 29 September 2014, and second deputy speaker of the Riksdag from 29 September 2014 to 24 September 2018. He represents Skåne County North and East. From 4 October 2022 until the end of that term he sat on the Committee on Defence, and from 13 October 2022 he has chaired the Swedish delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. His own website states instead that he was born in Helsingborg, and that he lives in Kristianstad. Before entering parliament he took a master's-level degree in chemical engineering (civilingenjör) at the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University in 2004, after a technical upper-secondary education and conscript service that the Riksdag records as ending in 1998 with the rank of second lieutenant (fänrik) at the K3 regiment.

Söder was among the Sweden Democrats around party leader Jimmie Åkesson who took a larger role in the party in the mid-2000s. The Local has described him as one of a "gang of four" associated with that change. He was party secretary at the 2010 election, when the Sweden Democrats won 5.70 percent of the national vote and entered the Riksdag, and at the 2014 election, when they won 12.86 percent and became the third-largest party.

On 29 September 2014, when the new chamber chose its presidium, most members handed in blank ballots rather than vote for him as second deputy speaker. He was elected on a later round, after no candidate had a majority and the rules allowed the person with the most votes to take the post. Left Party leader Jonas Sjöstedt called the result unsuitable and referred to what he described as earlier homophobic and racist statements by Söder. On 24 September 2018 the chamber set aside the practice of giving the post to the third-largest party: Lotta Johnsson Fornarve of the Left Party defeated Söder by 149 votes to 82, with 117 blank ballots, on the third round.

In a December 2014 interview he separated Swedish citizenship from being Swedish. He was reported as saying that Jews could be citizens but could not be Swedish unless they assimilated, and he also spoke of the Sámi and of Kurds. Lena Posner Körösi, then president of the Official Council of Jewish Communities in Sweden, called the remarks antisemitic, and Prime Minister Stefan Löfven called them "very, very scary." Söder said he had been quoted out of context and pointed to what he described as a long commitment to Israel and to Jewish people. In June 2018 he wrote that Jews and Sámi hold a minority position in Sweden "just because they are not Swedes," a comment that was reported to the police; the investigation was not taken forward. He stayed in parliament after leaving the speaker's chair, and in October 2022 the Sweden Democrats named him to lead Sweden's delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.

Early life and education

Childhood and schooling

Björn Söder was born on 3 January 1976 in Väsby parish, Skåne County, according to the Riksdag’s biographical volume Fakta om folkvalda. Nationalencyklopedin identifies that parish as one in the Church of Sweden’s Diocese of Lund, in Höganäs Municipality on the Kulla peninsula in north-western Skåne. The parish gives its church address as S:t Andreas väg in Höganäs. Söder’s own website states instead that he was born in Helsingborg, the larger city to the south. The parliamentary entry gives his profession as civil engineer but names no parents and no school before upper secondary level.

In 1995 he completed a three-year technical programme at upper secondary school. His curriculum vitae names the school as Tycho Braheskolan in Helsingborg.

Military service and engineering studies

Fakta om folkvalda records that in 1998 he finished conscript service as a värnpliktig fänrik, a conscript second lieutenant, at K 3. K 3, the Life Regiment Hussars, is based at Karlsborg Fortress in Karlsborg, where the Swedish Armed Forces describe it as training light, mobile combat units. Söder’s website adds that he left national service as a ranger soldier (jägarsoldat) holding the rank of fänrik. Neither that site nor the parliamentary entry states the length of the service or the year it began.

In 2004 he took a civilingenjör degree in chemical engineering from Lunds tekniska högskola (LTH). LTH, the faculty of engineering at Lund University, offers that programme as a five-year course of 300 higher-education credits leading to the civilingenjörsexamen. While a student he sat, in 1999–2000, on the council of Teknologkåren, the engineering students’ union at LTH.

Employment before parliament

From 2000 to 2006 he was a co-owner of BMJ Aktiv HB, a partnership engaged in web production. The same Riksdag volume lists Jimmie Åkesson as a co-owner in web production at BMJ Aktiv for those years. A 2022 profile in Arbetsvärlden reported that Åkesson had worked for several years as a web designer in a company he had started with two party colleagues, without naming the firm or the partners.

In 2004 Söder worked at the dairy company Skånemejerier AB on the revision and development of control programmes. His website describes the engagement as project employment. The parliamentary biography then lists technical management at Unilever AB from 2005 to 2009. His curriculum vitae calls the post technical management assistant and dates it from 2004, the title also used when the magazine Ingenjören summarised his engineering experience in 2018. Asked what he had taken into politics, he told Ingenjören that the broad knowledge was useful, as was the way of tackling problems, but that he had not worked politically in the field for which he had trained.

The Unilever years overlapped the start of his time as party secretary of the Sweden Democrats, a post the Riksdag biography dates from 2005 to 2015. He became a member of the Riksdag in 2010.

Political beginnings

From the Progress Party to the Sweden Democrats

Söder’s first party membership was not in the Sweden Democrats. Around the 1991 election, aged 15, he joined Framstegspartiet, a right-populist grouping in north-western Skåne, and organized its campaign in a school election at his lower-secondary school in Höganäs; he has said he joined because of the party’s criticism of immigration policy. Aftonbladet has reported that he started a petition at Kullaskolan in Höganäs after Muslim pupils asked for meals other than pork. The Progress Party in north-western Skåne was then led by Tony Wiklander, later a Sweden Democrat member of the Riksdag. Söder left after internal disputes, about three years on.

In 1994, at 18, he took a leaflet from Sweden Democrat activists outside Tycho Braheskolan in Helsingborg, ordered an information pack and joined the youth wing, Sverigedemokratisk ungdom (SDU). At the party’s 1995 national meeting he met Mikael Jansson, who had just become leader, and the younger Jimmie Åkesson, and decided to commit himself to the organization. The Sweden Democrats, founded in 1988 with roots in the far-right group Bevara Sverige Svenskt, were still a small party outside parliament.

Youth wing and local office

In 1997 Söder and Åkesson were elected substitute members of the national board, with responsibility for the party’s IT work. The biography Söder later supplied to the Riksdag lists him as a board substitute in 1997–98, a full board member in 2001–03 and again from 2005, and a member of the executive committee from 2001. He was SDU secretary from 1998 to 2000. Åkesson chaired the youth wing from 2000 to 2005. In 1999, after the mother party dropped a demand for the death penalty while the youth wing kept it in its programme, Söder set out sixteen arguments for capital punishment in the paper Demokraten. He wrote that he welcomed the party’s change but wanted the question debated.

He took a seat on Höör municipal council in the 1998 election and held it until 2002. Höör was an early municipal foothold: the Sweden Democrats won one of their first two council seats there in 1991. A Social Democratic councillor, Anders Bergelin, later recalled Söder entering the chamber with a shaved head, and said the local group “lived in the shadow,” taking little part in debate. Alongside the party work he studied chemical engineering in Lund, at the Faculty of Engineering of Lund University, and took the degree in 2004.

In the autumn of 1998 Söder and Richard Jomshof founded the National Democratic Student Association in Lund, with Jomshof as chair and Söder as secretary and treasurer. Åkesson and Mattias Karlsson, reading philosophy and history, joined the circle; one account places a meeting of all four at the Graffiti café in January 1999. The association stayed small, with about twenty active members. In the autumn of 1999 Söder was elected to the engineering students’ union council on an 11.4 percent turnout. After a student paper reported his party membership, 155 signatures forced a fresh election in February 2000; turnout rose to 48 percent and he lost the seat.

He chaired the Sweden Democrats’ southern district from 2002 to 2005. At the 2003 national meeting, moved from Örebro to Trollhättan after a venue cancellation, Jansson was re-elected leader. Johan Rinderheim was moved from first to second vice-chair, and Söder became vice party chair, a post the Riksdag biography dates to 2003–2005. Expo reported that he had pressed for the expulsion of a councillor in Askersund over racist statements.

Further local office came after the national leadership changed. He sat on Helsingborg municipal council from 2006 to 2010 and in the Region Skåne assembly from 2006 to 2014, serving as group leader and as a member of the regional executive board from 2006 to 2010.

The 2005 leadership change

In February 2005 the nomination committee unanimously proposed Åkesson, then 25, as leader. The party was split between a “bunker” faction that wanted to keep Jansson, leader since 1995 and supported by the Stockholm and Gothenburg districts, and a “renewal” or “Skåne” faction built around Åkesson and the Lund circle of Söder, Karlsson and Jomshof, with some younger members in Stockholm. At the national meeting in Norrköping on 7 May 2005, Åkesson defeated Jansson by 91 votes to 50. Jansson told Expo he was disappointed and surprised, but that he would continue to work full-time for the party; Åkesson said his first task was to bridge the internal conflicts. In the 2002 election the party had been the largest outside parliament, with 1.4 percent and 49 council seats in 29 municipalities.

Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet have described Åkesson, Söder, Karlsson and Jomshof as “de fyras gäng,” the student circle that in 2005 displaced Jansson and took the leading posts. Söder’s term as vice-chair ended that year. The Riksdag biography lists him as party secretary from 2005 until 2015.

Party secretary

Building the organization

Björn Söder was party secretary of the Sweden Democrats from 2005 until 26 February 2015. The Riksdag biography, based on information he supplied, dates the post to 2005–2015, and reports at the handover described a decade in it. Those years ran alongside Jimmie Åkesson's leadership, which began at the party congress in Norrköping in May 2005.

In May 2006 a membership ballot, with about a third of members voting, replaced the torch emblem with a hepatica (blåsippa) in the colours of the Swedish flag. Åkesson said the party had changed over the previous 10 to 15 years and that the symbols should show it. Expo has described the earlier torch as identical to the emblem of the British National Front. In December 2006 Dagens Nyheter reported that the small party Högerpartiet de konservativa accused the Sweden Democrats of taking its hepatica.

The vote the organization had to staff rose with each election. In the Riksdag election of 2006 the party received 2.93 percent (162,463 votes) and stayed outside parliament; in 2010 it received 5.70 percent (339,610 votes) and entered; in 2014 it received 12.86 percent (801,178 votes).

Membership figures are the party's own, as passed on by news outlets. TT, via SVT, put 2010 membership at 5,846, up 43 percent on 2009 and 79 percent men; Söder wrote that work had begun to attract women and that much remained. The 2011–2013 activity report, for a period when the secretary chaired the administration-and-organization group, recorded 7,890 members at the end of 2012 and 10,471 in September 2013. It also said the executive committee had approved 40 municipal associations and dissolved three, leaving 132 approved associations—several covering more than one municipality—in 23 districts, with national organizers helping new associations and, in 2013, candidate recruitment and training. Dagens Opinion reported 15,871 members at the end of 2014, up 3,990, or 33 percent, on the year before.

Statistics Sweden recorded 612 municipal-council seats in 2010, 332 more than in 2006, seven of them left empty. After the 2014 municipal elections it reported seats in 285 of 290 municipalities, up from 246 in 2010.

Candidate screening and the extremism policy

Screening of members and candidates was part of the secretariat's public role. A 2011 Expressen investigation quoted former local officials who called Söder the person chiefly responsible for expulsions and said that people close to the leadership were treated more leniently than ordinary representatives. Candidates signed a conduct declaration (vandelsförsäkran). In 2014 Dagens Nyheter and Helsingborgs Dagblad, as reported by Expressen, found that Michael Rosenberg—later chair of the national nomination committee and a municipal commissioner in Helsingborg—had marked himself unconvicted on his 2010 form despite a two-year sentence for aggravated theft and fraud. Söder countersigned it after the southern district warned against a candidate convicted of serious crime; he told DN that the box "does not matter" because the leadership already knew, and that "one does not need to tell everyone everything."

On 12 October 2012 Åkesson wrote to elected representatives that those who did not share the party's values should resign, and he told Expressen there would be zero tolerance of extremism, racism and vexatious litigants (rättshaverister), citing cases since the 2010 election. Ekot's count, reported by Svenska Dagbladet, found 30 expulsions since that election, against five by the other Riksdag parties combined. Söder blamed rapid growth: representatives the party "perhaps had not really kept a good eye on" had been elected and later judged unsuitable. On 18 March 2013 an extra board meeting expelled twelve people, including Patrik Ehn of Gothenburg, by 14 votes to 3 in his case. Söder cited Ehn's background in Nazi and extremist movements and contacts with the German National Democratic Party (NPD); Ehn denied the contacts and called the decision unfounded. SvD tied the meeting to the zero-tolerance line Åkesson had set the previous autumn.

Leaving the post in 2015

In 2013 Söder told Svenska Dagbladet that he wanted a successor after the next election. He said eight years as secretary, together with leading the Riksdag group, was too much, and that the jobs should be split if the party and the parliamentary group grew.

The handover waited through the 2014 election and Åkesson's sick leave. In January 2015 SVT reported a dispute over timing: Söder wanted to stay while Åkesson was absent, while Åkesson and acting leader Mattias Karlsson wanted an immediate change. On 26 January the board unanimously named Richard Jomshof, who took office on 26 February after a month's handover. Karlsson called the date a compromise—agreement on the change, disagreement only on when—and said the post would shift from administration toward communication, a need he linked to the December Agreement (Decemberöverenskommelsen), after which he described the party as Sweden's leading opposition party. Söder said he had wanted March or April so staff could be in place; district chairs asked for a month, and once his later date failed he would rather have left that day, having warned that a faster change would cause problems. Jomshof said there was no political dividing line between them and that he would use the post, as Åkesson wanted, for internal and external communication so as to relieve the party leader.

Riksdag career

Björn Söder has been a member of the Riksdag since 4 October 2010, the day the chamber elected after the Sweden Democrats’ entry into parliament was convened. The roll read into the record that day listed him for the party in the Stockholm County constituency, and the opening protocol of the 2014–2018 term placed him there again. From the 2018 election he has represented Skåne County North and East, in Skåne County. The Riksdag’s member register still gives that constituency and records an uninterrupted mandate from 4 October 2010 through 23 September 2030.

Group leader, 2010–2014

On 24 September 2010, five days after the general election, the Sweden Democrats’ 20 newly elected members chose Söder, then the party’s secretary, as leader of the parliamentary group. The choice was notified to the Speaker of the Riksdag when the new chamber met on 4 October 2010. Under the Riksdag Act the party groups named their special representatives for the electoral period, and Söder was listed for the Sweden Democrats, with Sven-Olof Sällström as substitute. The Riksdag’s assignment record gives the same dates, 4 October 2010 to 29 September 2014.

He left the post on the opening day of the next term. In the notification of group leaders read out on 29 September 2014, Mattias Karlsson was named for the Sweden Democrats, with Per Ramhorn as substitute, from that day for the rest of the electoral period.

Second deputy speaker, 2014–2018

The same sitting elected the presidium. Per Westerberg, presiding as the senior member, conducted the elections. The chamber chose Urban Ahlin of the Swedish Social Democratic Party as Speaker and Tobias Billström of the Moderate Party as first deputy speaker, both by acclamation. Mattias Karlsson then nominated Söder for second deputy speaker, citing the Sweden Democrats’ position as the third-largest party.

Hans Linde of the Left Party asked for a secret ballot so that members who did not want to give active support to a Sweden Democrat could cast a blank vote. There was no opposing candidate. More than half the votes cast were required in the first two rounds; only in a third round was the member with the most votes elected. Söder received 53 votes against 292 blank papers in the first round, 51 against 294 in the second, and 52 against 292 in the third, and was then declared second deputy speaker. SVT reported that 46 of the party’s 49 members were present for the first count, so seven of the 53 votes came from other parties, and that the ballots took several hours. Esabelle Dingizian of the Green Party was chosen third deputy speaker by acclamation. Söder’s term as second deputy speaker is recorded as 29 September 2014 to 24 September 2018, the period in which Ahlin was Speaker.

On 24 September 2018 the new Riksdag elected Andreas Norlén of the Moderates as Speaker and, by acclamation, Åsa Lindestam of the Social Democrats as first deputy speaker. For second deputy speaker the Sweden Democrats again nominated Söder. Mia Sydow Mölleby of the Left Party nominated Lotta Johnsson Fornarve and demanded a secret ballot. The Social Democrats and the Greens said they would vote for Fornarve, while the parties of the then Alliance had indicated that they would largely abstain. Neither candidate reached a majority of the votes cast in the first two rounds. The first count was 147 for Fornarve, 80 for Söder and 121 blank; the second was 149, 82 and 116. In the third round Fornarve received 149 votes, Söder 82 and 117 papers were blank, and Fornarve was elected.

Karlsson then nominated Söder for third deputy speaker. Anders W. Jonsson of the Centre Party nominated Kerstin Lundgren and requested a secret ballot. Lundgren received 272 votes, Söder 69 and seven papers were blank, so Lundgren became third deputy speaker and the Sweden Democrats held no place in the presidium.

Committees and later mandates

During the group-leader years he was a deputy member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs from 26 November 2010 and of the Committee on Defence from the same date. He was a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee from 7 October 2014 to 26 September 2022, and a deputy member again from 12 October 2022 to 28 May 2026. On the Defence Committee he remained a deputy through 26 September 2022 and was a full member from 4 October 2022 to 28 September 2026. The register also seats him, for a series of short sessions, on the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence: as a member in parts of each year from 2014 to 2022, including 20 October to 21 December 2022, and later as a deputy.

He has sat on the War Delegation since 19 October 2010, with the mandate renewed from 11 October 2022. That delegation, made up of the Speaker and 50 members chosen for each electoral period, can if necessary take the Riksdag’s place when Sweden is at war or in danger of war. Since 4 October 2022 he has been a deputy member of the Advisory Council on Foreign Affairs.

On the international side, the register lists him as a member of the Riksdag’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe from 14 October 2014 to 9 October 2022. He was again a member from 11 October 2022 and was elected chair on 13 October 2022. The delegation’s report on its work in 2022, dated 2 March 2023, is signed by him as chair. He joined the Riksdag delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly on 24 October 2018 and served as a full member until 24 October 2022, then again from 26 October 2022 to 10 April 2024. He was a deputy member from 10 April 2024 to 11 February 2025 and has been a full member again since that date.

Nation, citizenship and migration

Citizenship and the nation

In December 2014, as party secretary of the Sweden Democrats and second deputy speaker of the Riksdag, Björn Söder distinguished Swedish citizenship from membership of the Swedish nation in an interview with Niklas Orrenius for Dagens Nyheter. The report, “Den leende nationalismen”, was published on 14 December from the party’s municipal and county conference in Västerås.

In a lecture on party ideology he said Sweden already contained other nations: the Sámi were Swedish citizens but belonged to the Sámi nation, as did Tornedalians, whom he called “tornedalsfinnar”, and too many nations inside the nation-state could become a problem. In the interview he described an “öppen svenskhet”, an open Swedishness, that could include people with roots abroad if they adapted and were assimilated. Asked about people with more than one identity, he said some belonged to the Sámi nation or the Jewish nation. On whether one could be both Jewish and Swedish, he said he believed most people of Jewish origin who had become Swedes left their Jewish identity, but that if they did not this need not be a problem, because citizenship and national belonging had to be separated and they could remain Swedish citizens. Of the comedian Soran Ismail, who had called himself wholly Swedish and wholly Kurdish, Söder said he did not think one could belong to two nations in that way, though Kurds could be citizens, and that the difficulty was if too many people in Sweden belonged to other nations.

Orrenius emailed the quotations to Söder, who replied that he had been understood. Söder then told Aftonbladet that the quotations were correct but depended on context. He listed five recognized national minorities—Sámi, Roma, Tornedalians, Sweden Finns and Jews—and said they had that status because they were not part of the Swedish nation; they were, he said, “not Swedish in identity”, while in all probability Swedish citizens. The same week he told SVT that the quotations were accurate but concerned newcomers forming “nations in the state”, not the recognized minorities, which the party supported, and that citizens had the same rights and duties regardless of origin. Orrenius said the remarks were not taken out of context.

National minorities

Those five groups are the ones Sweden named on joining the Council of Europe’s minority treaties. In December 1999 the Riksdag, on government bill 1998/99:143, decided to accede to the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and to recognize Jews, Roma, Sámi, Sweden Finns and Tornedalians as national minorities. Sweden ratified the Framework Convention on 9 February 2000; it entered into force for Sweden on 1 June 2000, and the language charter was ratified on the same day in February. The government described the groups as long established in Sweden, with a distinct religious, linguistic or cultural affiliation and a wish to keep their identity; belonging rests on individual self-identification and is not compulsory. The Sámi are also recognized as an indigenous people. Article 5 commits states to let persons belonging to national minorities maintain their culture and identity, and article 5.2 prohibits forced assimilation. From 2010 a single minorities act applied those protections throughout the country, not only in designated areas.

In June 2018, after Centre Party leader Annie Lööf cited the 2014 interview in a party-leader debate, Söder wrote on the Centre Party’s Facebook page that she diminished the position of Jews and Sámi “when she indirectly claims that they are Swedes”, and that “these groups have minority status in Sweden precisely because they are not Swedes.” He told SVT that each person identifies their own national belonging and that he was speaking in support of the minorities’ separate status and rights. Lööf replied that a citizen of Sweden is Swedish whether or not that person belongs to a national minority.

Immigration and integration

In the same interview Söder connected the argument to migration. For a city such as Malmö he proposed ending EBO, the rule under which asylum seekers arrange their own housing, stopping refugee reception, and a “repatrieringsbidrag” paying immigrants to leave, in order to make a society with a shared identity easier to build. He said the groups then arriving were too large, that people who wanted to move back should be helped to do so, and that official information in Arabic should be phased out so that newcomers learned Swedish.

The party’s principle programme, adopted in 2011 while Söder was party secretary, puts the same distinction in formal terms. It calls the nationalism “open and non-racist” because the nation is defined by culture, language, identity and loyalty, not by historical belonging or genetic membership, and is therefore open to people from other nations. A person born in Sweden, or adopted there at an early age, of Swedish-speaking parents with a Swedish or Nordic identity is counted as native; someone of non-Swedish background counts as assimilated only if they speak fluent Swedish, regard themselves as Swedish, live by Swedish culture, treat Swedish history as their own and feel greater loyalty to the Swedish nation than to any other. It separates citizenship from national belonging but holds citizens equal before the law, and it rejects multiculturalism—many national cultures without a superior majority culture—in favour of the assimilation policy it says existed until 1975. National minorities are the exception: minority nations inside the state should be exempt from general assimilation and given cultural autonomy, short of any conflict with law, basic human rights or democracy. Seeking asylum is distinguished from a right to receive it; refugee immigration should be limited to people who meet the United Nations refugee convention and given only temporary permits, with help otherwise directed near crises. The programme also calls for “active and generous” support for immigrants who wish to return, and treats limited immigration as necessary because assimilation is often slow, sometimes fails, and is harder when cultural distance is greater and the group is larger.

Foreign and security policy

Defence and NATO

For years before 2022, Björn Söder, then security-policy spokesperson for the Sweden Democrats, opposed Swedish membership of NATO. In an August 2018 article for the party paper SD-Kuriren he wrote that joining the alliance alone would not strengthen Sweden’s defence, because it would leave the task to “someone else”, principally the United States. Membership, he argued, would sharply raise tension around the Baltic Sea: if Sweden and Finland both entered, the sea would become an inland sea for NATO countries and Russia would react. He cited Ukraine as a warning of how far Russia would go against neighbours seeking membership, and proposed instead a force able to defend the whole country plus a defence union with Finland, which he said would not upset the regional balance and would be acceptable to NATO and to Russia. He repeated the argument in Svenska Dagbladet on 19 February 2019, with other Sweden Democrat members of the defence and foreign affairs committees: Swedish entry would probably pull Finland in, create a “NATO inland sea” and prompt Russian countermeasures that increased tension.

The party line changed after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as a leadership decision rather than a shift attributable to Söder alone. On 11 April 2022 the party board authorised support for a Swedish application if Finland applied. Foreign-policy spokesperson Aron Emilsson said the two countries needed to “go hand in hand” and that Sweden could not “run after”; party leader Jimmie Åkesson had said over the preceding weekend that his own view had moved. On 16 May 2022, after a Riksdag debate, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson of the Swedish Social Democratic Party said the government would apply, citing a broad parliamentary majority and Finland’s decision the day before. On 22 March 2023 the Riksdag approved accession by 269 votes to 37. All 64 Sweden Democrats present voted yes; only the Left Party and the Green Party voted no. Sweden deposited its instrument of accession on 7 March 2024 and became NATO’s 32nd member.

Söder had been a member of the Riksdag delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly since 2018, on its Economics and Security Committee and related subcommittees, and he remained after the party reversed its position and Sweden joined.

The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly

On 13 October 2022 Söder was chosen chair of Sweden’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Under an arrangement between the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party on presidium posts, the Moderates, representing the chamber majority, named the chair. The delegation has eight members — four Social Democrats, two Moderates and two Sweden Democrats — and the chair has no casting vote. Johan Büser of the Social Democrats, chair in the previous term, became deputy.

The Social Democrats protested. Büser called the appointment remarkable because Söder represented the Sweden Democrats and because of statements he had made, and because the OSCE works on human rights and the rule of law. A head of delegation, he said, sends a signal that can be mistaken for Sweden’s position, even though members sit in a personal capacity and cannot formally speak for the country. The Local, citing the TT news agency, also reported criticism of Söder’s 2018 remarks that Sweden’s Sámi and Jewish minorities were “not Swedish” and were recognised as minorities for that reason, a distinction he drew between ethnicity and citizenship. The party nominated Julia Kronlid, rather than Söder, for the deputy speakership many had expected him to seek again. The assembly, established in 1990, brings together 323 parliamentarians from 57 states and observes elections.

Armenia, Turkey and other international positions

Söder has pressed successive governments to recognise the Armenian genocide in official policy. In May 2018, as Second Deputy Speaker, he led a Riksdag delegation to Yerevan. President Armen Sarkissian welcomed the Riksdag’s 2010 resolution; they also discussed the EU’s Eastern Partnership, the EU–Armenia partnership agreement, and the Nagorno-Karabakh talks then run by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs.

The 2010 decision came before the Sweden Democrats entered parliament. On 11 March the Riksdag, by 131 votes to 130, called on the government to recognise the 1915 killings of Armenians and of Chaldeans, Syrians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks as genocide, after the Foreign Affairs Committee had recommended rejection and four centre-right members voted with the opposition. Turkey recalled its ambassador, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cancelled a visit. Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said the vote was not government policy and would not help normalisation between Turkey and Armenia. Later governments also refused the term “genocide”. In 2019 Söder called that refusal a “betrayal” and said a visit just after the Velvet Revolution had impressed him with Armenia’s “democratic maturity”.

In June 2021 the Sweden Democrats in Skåne announced that President Sarkissian had awarded him the Medal of Mkhitar Gosh, given for outstanding state, diplomatic or political-science work, for strengthening Swedish–Armenian friendship and interparliamentary cooperation. On 24 April 2023 he told Armenpress, as head of the OSCE PA delegation, that Turkey “must recognize what happened” and that this would be “the first step in normalizing relations with neighboring Armenia”. That week an annual Riksdag commemoration by the Sweden–Armenia friendship group, which he chairs, went ahead after Tidö party group leaders were told that marking the genocide could complicate NATO talks with Turkey, which denies it. Foreign Minister Tobias Billström said the ministry had only discussed with Moderate colleagues whether they should sit on the panel.

Controversies and reception

Statements on sexual minorities

During Stockholm Pride in August 2007, Söder, then party secretary of the Sweden Democrats, wrote on the party site SD-Kuriren that a “homo-lobby” was trying to “normalize” its “sexual aberrations.” He asked why that should stop with gay, bisexual and transgender people: “Why not people who commit bestiality (sex with animals) or pedophilia (sex with minors)? These sexual aberrations are not normal and never will be normal.” He called Pride “the perverse homosexual event.” Expo quoted RFSL’s then chair as saying Söder had grouped gay, bisexual and transgender people with people who have sex with animals or abuse children. Press spokesman Jonas Åkerlund said he did not read the post that way. Under the post, Söder wrote that homosexuality and pedophilia could not be compared “straight off,” and that he had raised pedophilia only to ask what would be “normalized” next.

In August 2023, again during Pride, he wrote on X that he had “nothing against homo- or bisexuality” unless it “harms the innocent,” but that he would never defend Pride’s “close — and now legitimate — links to pedophilia and children’s involvement in the sexual world of adults.” After Speaker Andreas Norlén opened the festival and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson flew a Pride flag at Sagerska huset, Söder wrote that they were legitimizing pedophilia. Sveriges Television reported that he later deleted some posts and declined to comment. Foreign Minister Tobias Billström of the Moderate Party called the posts “contemptuous, unworthy and wrong,” and said Söder owed an apology to those he “sweepingly accuses of utterly appalling things.” Employment Minister Johan Pehrson of the Liberals called them “astonishing drivel.” Kristersson told TV4 the charges were “grotesque,” “unacceptable and deeply insulting and wrong.” Group leader Linda Lindberg told SVT the target was Pride, not LGBT+ people, and that the “raised tone is problematic.”

The 2014 interview and later remarks on Swedishness

On 14 December 2014 Dagens Nyheter published Niklas Orrenius’s “Den leende nationalismen,” from a party conference in Västerås. Söder, by then also second deputy speaker of the Riksdag, said Sweden “contains other nations,” citing “the Sámi nation”: its members were citizens but belonged to that nation, and too many nations in the nation-state could be “a problem.” Asked if one could be both Jewish and Swedish, he said: “I think that most people of Jewish origin who have become Swedes leave their Jewish identity. But if they do not, that need not be a problem. One must distinguish between citizenship and national belonging.” They could remain citizens; “Sámi and Jews have lived in Sweden for a long time.” Orrenius emailed the quotations before publication; Söder replied that he had been understood and that they should not be tidied up too much afterwards.

Critics took this to mean Sámi and Jews are not Swedes unless they assimilate. Next day Söder told Aftonbladet the lines were accurate but context-dependent. The five recognized national minorities had that status, he said, “because they are not part of the Swedish nation”; they were “not Swedish in identity” while still citizens. Orrenius said nothing had been cut and the interview could not be read otherwise.

Prime Minister Stefan Löfven called the remarks “very, very frightening” in someone meant to represent the whole country. Lena Posner-Körösi, chair of the Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities, told DN that others defining her was “nothing other than an insult,” and heard a 1930s claim that people who were not “racially pure” could not be trusted with only a Swedish passport. Willy Silberstein, chair of the Swedish Committee Against Antisemitism, said he was “Swedish just as much as Björn Söder.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center ranked the episode sixth among 2014’s worst antisemitic or anti-Israel incidents, under “Deputy speaker to Jews: abandon your religious identity,” citing Posner-Körösi’s remark to The Guardian that it was “exactly like in 1930s Germany.” Söder told SVT the center had used quotations out of context.

In June 2018, after Centre leader Annie Lööf cited the interview in a leaders’ debate as an example of party racism, Söder wrote on the party’s Facebook page that she belittled Jews and Sámi by treating them as Swedes. “These groups have a minority position in Sweden precisely because they are not Swedes,” he wrote, and called her stance racist. Lööf answered that a citizen is Swedish whether or not they belong to a national minority. Sámi Parliament speaker Paulus Kuoljok called the post provocative campaigning; Rural Affairs Minister Sven-Erik Bucht, a Tornedalian, objected to being told “we are not Swedes.” Söder said each person decides their belonging and that he had spoken for minorities’ “distinctiveness and special rights.” A complaint of incitement against a population group was filed; police region East opened no preliminary investigation and closed it the same day.

Sámi lawyer Mattias Åhrén told SVT that Söder was right in substance — “Sámi are not Swedes” — because that distinct status is what a Sámi Parliament and special language and land rights rest on, whereas calling Sámi Swedes, he argued, points toward assimilation. Board chair Håkan Jonsson was among those who objected, and Discrimination Ombudsman Agneta Broberg said the statements single groups out. The party press secretary said there could “never be too many Sámi” and that the party wanted them to keep their culture.

Political and organizational reactions

The interview brought demands that he resign as deputy speaker. Roger Haddad of the Liberals said Söder was attacking two national minorities “with hundreds of years of presence in Sweden” and was unfit to go on representing the Riksdag. He did not resign. In the chamber, members refused to treat a sitting he chaired as ordinary. On 15 December Rossana Dinamarca of the Left Party would not say “Mr Speaker” and answered, “You are not my speaker.” Two days later members addressed the chair in North Sámi, Hebrew (“Shalom, Mr Speaker”) and Romani. Speaker Urban Ahlin said only Swedish is used in the Riksdag and that a presiding deputy speaker owes the office respect. Söder called the protests regrettable but not personal.

Jonas Hinnfors of the University of Gothenburg told SVT that Söder had stated party policy, that the party could cast the protests as martyrdom and gain support, and that in the speaker’s office he “perhaps should have thought twice.” Orrenius set the interview against that restyling: a relaxed Västerås meeting unlike the guarded circles of about 2000, after the party in 2011 began calling itself “a socially conservative party with a nationalist basic outlook.” He wrote that the approved lines were harder than leaders’ recent public language. Historian Fredrik Persson-Lahusen, in the same article, called the view “a radical and consistent nationalism,” nearer origin than civic membership.

Other activities

Church of Sweden and municipal roles

Söder held elected posts in the Church of Sweden before his years in the Riksdag. His Riksdag biography lists him as a member of the diocesan assembly of the Diocese of Lund from 2001 to 2009, a substitute in the Church Assembly (kyrkomötet) from 2001 to 2005 and a full member from 2005 to 2009, and secretary from 2007 to 2009 of Fädernas kyrka, a Sweden Democrats nominating group in the church. In September 2010 Kyrkans Tidning reported that the newly elected MP had been a church office-holder, including in the Church Assembly, but had left the Church of Sweden.

It also records a municipal council seat in Helsingborg (2006–2010) and one on the regional council of Region Skåne, in Skåne County, from 2006 to 2014, where he was group leader and a regional-board member from 2006 to 2010. Alongside parliament he sat on the council of Kristianstad Municipality. Expressen reported in 2017 that he had been a councillor there since 2015; the Riksdag biography dates the assignment from 2014, and the minutes of 7 February 2023 still name him as a member. On 7 February 2023 the council elected him a director and vice-chair of Kristianstads Airport AB from that year's annual general meeting until the end of the 2025 annual general meeting.

Party board exit and other engagements

The Riksdag biography records membership of the Sweden Democrats' party board in 2001–2003 and from 2005. Ahead of the party congress (landsdagar) in Västerås on 23–26 November 2023, the nominating committee left him off its proposed board. He told Svenska Dagbladet that after 22 years he had nothing against stepping back, citing other duties and a family with small children, but that the committee had given no reason, which he called "rather remarkable and weak" in comments to Kristianstadsbladet and Norra Skåne. The congress adopted a board without him. Altinget wrote that he had been removed after 20 years.

Aftonbladet described the change as the end of the "de fyras gäng" era of Jimmie Åkesson, Richard Jomshof, Mattias Karlsson and Söder, who had met as students in Lund. Åkesson said the committee wanted less weight for representatives from Skåne; asked whether Söder's posts on X had mattered, he told TT that they "may well have". In those posts Söder had accused Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson of "legitimising paedophilia" by supporting Stockholm Pride. Söder called the board dispute a conflict created by the media.

In February 2023 he left the chair of the Sweden Democrats in Kristianstad, held since his election at the 2017 local annual meeting, to concentrate on Riksdag work. Vice-chair Fia Rosenstråle succeeded him. He chairs Hepatica, the party's democracy-assistance foundation. In June 2025 Aftonbladet reported that an Ernst & Young review for the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) found significant risks or critical control failures, after years in which Sida refused the foundation funding on quality grounds and then approved it.